Hanapin Marketing

Could you briefly describe your company?

I work for Hennessy Industries. We’re an aftermarket auto manufacturer of tire changers, wheel balancers, brake latches, and wheel weights. The bulk of our business stems from tire changers although wheel balancers make up a large portion of it, and then followed by brake latches. We sell to large companies like Sears and whatnot.

What is your position?

I’m the e-commerce marketing manager.

Could you describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you began the relationship with Hanapin Marketing?

We wanted to put a system into place that would allow us to generate more leads for equipment sales and get those leads out into the market, into the hands of our sales representatives. When we first began working with Hanapin, we didn’t have a structured system in place. We were doing a bit here and there and probably generating between 150 and 200 leads a month, but we weren’t tracking those leads effectively. We really didn’t have a viable lead management process in place, both from the acquisition side and from the management side.

Could you describe the scope of these projects? For instance, did they involve custom visual design, backend development, training, and support?

We’ve really evolved through time, which I imagine is quite normal in a partnership like this. We were originally using an account rep at Google, and we simply weren’t satisfied with the service. That was the impetus for switching to Hanapin Marketing. I’d been following their blog for quite some time, PPC Hero, and I was impressed with their methodology and approach.

The Hanapin team came down and spent a day with us to review our capabilities, challenges, and goals. Once we did that, we began working relatively slow in order to establish effective and cooperative workflow. They began with reorganizing and reconfiguring our Google Adwords campaign. That included some strategic digital marketing advise, keyword research, execution, and tracking. Once we saw that the new campaigns were driving some serious results, we decided to develop a better lead management program. Hanapin has been indispensable in that effort. They’ve also developed and executed campaigns for Bing and Facebook, which have been equally successful. For example, in December of 2013, we sourced approximately 950 leads, which was both exciting and unexpected.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in monetary terms?

We’re investing between $25,000 and $30,000 a month, and that’s across Google, Bing, and our AdRoll marketing initiatives.

When was the most recent project completed?

Our projects remain ongoing.

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they’ve delivered?

We receive weekly reports, and we follow every imaginable metric, almost, from the acquisition of an initial lead for each of the different segments, and then whether sales were made from those. Outside of the example I mentioned about the leads we received in December, Hanapin has been responsible for our ability to utilize analytics and reporting. All the leads now flow through HubSpot and Salesforce, which allows our sales team to prioritize and pursue leads in a much more efficient manner.

How do you think Hanapin Marketing has performed on these various projects?

We’ve probably worked with five or six different vendors at this point. I can’t even tell you how great they’ve performed. We’ve had some disasters with other vendors. Hanapin Marketing actually cares about their clients’ business in the non-financial way. They’re not checking the boxes in the task list in order to fulfill the contract. They actively seek to bring some real, tangible value to both our own customers and us.

They will look at what we’re trying to achieve as a business and what we need to do to get there. They’re always responsive. If we send an email asking a question, it’s probably within the hour, maybe two, that we get a response. Everything is done in that fashion. It’s really been a great experience. They’re a true partner from that standpoint. Our staff suspects that we’ve generated an incremental $4 million in sales since the deployment of our lead generation and management program.

In retrospect, are there areas that you think Hanapin Marketing could improve upon, or are there things you’d do differently as the client before initiating these types of projects?

In hindsight, I think I would have started with a partner like Hanapin on the front end because our original campaign was relatively poor when we handed it off to them. They essentially inherited an ineffective campaign that was poorly planned, constructed, and executed. I hate to say that there’s nothing that they could do to improve their services because I’m sure there is. However, from my standpoint, I can’t really identify what that might be. We have a fantastic partnership with Hanapin Marketing. They bring so much value to our business that I really can’t imagine ever transitioning to another vendor for these services. Why fix what isn’t broken?